Geotagging Events, SXSW, Editing Comments and Venues
Ah, time for another long-overdue roundup. This episode: new geotagged events/venues, Upcoming at SXSW, comment editing, venue editing, attendee limits for private events, and new events since last login.Geotagged Events and Venues
One of the most popular requests is for geocoded events and venues, but it's been a historically tricky problem because of the lack of good free tools and Upcoming's free-form nature. That changed with the release of Yahoo's free geocoder, so we've geocoded our U.S. events and venues and are geocoding new ones as they're created. (Right now, 73% of upcoming events are geotagged to the address level, and 97% with any level of geocoding.)
What does this mean? We've added geocode information to our API, with new options for searching for events or venues near a lat/long or street address.
We've also added geotagged data to every RSS events feed, allowing you to do things like this with no programming required. Try the new "Yahoo! Maps" option on any "Subscribe" button throughout the site -- including your own events, your friends' events, and any metro.
This geocode information also exposed a bunch of duplicate venues from users promoting to many metros, sometimes not even in the same state as the event itself. We've built some internal tools for merging and removing these duplicates, so you might notice these dupes when using the API until we finish our spring cleaning.
Upcoming.org at South by Southwest Interactive
After a week in San Diego for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, the Upcoming.org team (all three of us) headed to Austin for SXSW Interactive along with a few thousand geeks, bloggers, and corporate sellouts. (And, fortunately, hardly any business-y types.)
For us, it was thrilling to see Upcoming become the de facto way to find out all of the unofficial parties and shows. 900 unique Upcoming users watchlisted 67 SXSW events, several with hundreds of attendees each. We saw other conference attendees using Upcoming on their laptops, heard panelists mentioning us, met geeks who have mashed us up, and sites like Valleywag doing daily roundups of the nightlife on Upcoming.
One of the biggest events was the Flickr/Upcoming/Del.icio.us happy hour, held at the Iron Cactus. Leonard managed to get a great band to play, and we had rad t-shirts made for the occasion. (Yes! We have extras, and will be handing them out at other upcoming events.) Not surprisingly, it became the most popular event ever on Upcoming, with 390 attendees (the limit for the event) and another 145 people watching. If you missed it, you can live vicariously through Scott Beale's lovely photos, and the rest of the Flickr attendees.
We met so many of our users (new and old) for the first time, and you're all amazing. We love you, and you inspire us to keep making Upcoming better.
So, what else is new?
Edit/Delete Your Comments
As of last night, you can now edit and delete your own comments across the site. Yay, one more oft-requested feature down.
Venue Editing
You can now edit the venues that you've created. If you need to correct an error or add more info, go for it.
Maximum Attendees for Private Events
At SXSW, we had demand for parties with a limited guest list or venue capacity. If you're creating a private event, you can now optionally set a "maximum attendees" for the event. If your event hits the limit, the "attend" option goes away, though everyone can still watchlist the event.
New Events Since Last Login
We're now showing which events are new since your last login on event listing, with a big NEW! Is it too loud? Let us know if you have any ideas for something more subtle.
Posted by 
waxpancake at March 28, 2006
waxpancake at March 28, 2006
-a
Using Safari, a number of times I've had UC "stall" when adding an event to a group or click "attend" or "watch". Generally if I back up and reload, the action turns out to have been successful, but it sure would be confusing to someone non-technical. A few times the stylesheet appears to fail to load, resulting in what looks like a text dump of all the events all run together on top of the page.
The "search" function doesn't appear to find events that I would expect it to, either it's not including keywords or body text in the searched text.
It would be valuable if when viewing an event, the list of groups showed some indication of which ones you're already a member of, like the list of people does for friends. A lot of times I'm trying to be helpful in associating events with relevant groups, and it's more work than it needs to be to sort out which ones are already associated.
The New indicator was nice, but I'd also like to be able to just see a list of new or changed events; the sidebar helps, but is not authoritative/complete.
One last request: for the Home page list of my events, it would be handy to be able to switch rapidly between watch and attend, as I often watch 3 events in a given evening and then attend just 1-2, depending on the flow of things. This would be very helpful for providing a more-accurate "where's Raines?" locator for my website.
Now if only watching/attending and so on could be ajaxed... OH! and that I could add a friend from the "Who's attending" listing on the event page.
I would love to see some photos thanks.
Drives me nuts when I see a venue with incorrect or weirdly formatted address or phone number and I can't correct it because I didn't create it.
how about geotagging berlin/germany? :-)
thank's a ton for this great tool which is a perfect addition to my website. i use it for posting events on my website which comes as a great benefit to all berlin visitors.
btw: www.energylab.de
thanks again
cheers
roman/berlin/germany
energylab - anything on electronic aspects of life
We have intermittent reports of blank pages on actions which we're tracking down but having a hard time reproducing, we'll continue to follow up on that.
A lot of good suggestions, will make sure that we have them all filed.
Corixidae: We go through the flagged stuff, but maybe we can be more proactive. We're rolling out more and more editing functionality, it's definitely on our radar.
energylab: Hmm, Berlin, you mean near 52.524/13.412? ;)